


A Gathering of Souls

by Morbane



Category: Hive Mind Series - Janet Edwards
Genre: Camping, F/M, Ghost Stories, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:08:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21841945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/pseuds/Morbane
Summary: Lucas and Amber attend an unofficial Halloween ritual.
Relationships: Amber/Lucas (Hive Mind)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	A Gathering of Souls

**Author's Note:**

  * For [burglebezzlement](https://archiveofourown.org/users/burglebezzlement/gifts).



According to Hiveist lore, Halloween was the festival of darkness and death, ruled by the hunter of souls, who prowled the realms Outside, beyond the Hive. Those who defied the Hive's laws and doubted the Hive's wisdom were his rightful prey.

During my first Halloween after Lottery, I'd gone Outside on purpose. I'd slept in a tent, crossed swollen streams, and flown home in an aircraft for the very first time - all part of the dangerous and unique work that I had to do as a telepath, working to protect the rest of the population of my Hive.

Outside was still a strange and often threatening environment to me, but in the year that had followed, I had come to learn that it had benefits as well. Its variety amazed me. Its vast emptiness allowed me to cleanse my mind of the echoes of thoughts I had read. Outside might never be a natural environment for me, but I was comfortable there. 

Which meant that everyone in my Strike teams - bodyguard and response forces who dealt with the problems I sensed - had to be at ease with the idea of going Outside too.

In the last Carnival Lottery, we'd added fifteen new members to the Strike team's ranks. Both Alpha and Beta teams had gained auxiliary members who trained with them and took on missions with them in rotation.

Despite having a reputation as the Telepath Unit that went outside, I'd only twice been required to leave the Hive since Carnival, and I didn't have to now, either. But we would surely be called on to do so again, and so, training was necessary. And the timing was right.

The timing was particularly right, Rothan had explained to us, because the festival of Halloween was important to the Ramblers Association. Every year, a group gathered at a designated point to celebrate a Hive festival outside the Hive: with fire and with stories.

Those who left the Hive tremorously and barely ventured beyond the flat plain that showed where our dwelling had been buried were not invited to the Ramblers' Halloween. But in my last mission Outside, the Hive travellers we had encountered had recommended it to us, and Rothan had been invited separately through his family. Rothan had advised us to go.

"Everywhere we go in the Hive, we have a cover story and a reason to be there," Emili had agreed, standing beside Rothan. "The fact that we've been invited to a Ramblers Association party means we've been noticed, positively. Taking up the invitation means that if we need to hunt another target in the territory around the Hive, we'll have help." 

And so, Lucas beside me, the members of the Alpha strike team ranged around me, I sat near the back of a gathering of Hive members from all levels as twilight fell. 

The unforeseen difficulty was the fire. A great bonfire blazed in front of us. I'd only ever seen fires that big in bookettes. I'd been close to a fire of that size - but it had been a lethal arson attack inside the Hive, and I'd been working desperately alongside my team to save citizens from suffocating deaths. None of my Strike team members who'd been with me then were entirely easy with the focus of the Halloween celebration, and Rothan, who'd stayed in the burning unit the longest to help others out, was furthest back behind me. The smell of the smoke bothered him, and was inescapable here.

At least this didn't mark our behaviour as unusual. We were known to be greenies, unaccustomed to most of the traditions of Outside. The fire was popular enough that rather than ragging us, those between us and it had made sympathetic noises to us about the evening chill. 

I ran circuit on my Strike team's minds, checking their surface thoughts for unease. Adika was worried, but about being surrounded by strangers, not by the fire. Kaden, who had once been terrified of the dark, was calm. Prashanta, a new recruit, was more nervous about giving away to the other attendees that he was a member of a Telepath Unit than he was of the unknown wilderness. I expanded my checks further, skipping over ten, twenty, thirty unfamiliar minds. Some were cold, one was suppressing the pain from a past injury, but most were in good spirits. None of the minds around me had the burning, entitled anger of a wild bee - our term for someone who had turned violent, against the Hive - nor matched any warning signs that suggested they would soon become one.

I pulled back my consciousness and opened my eyes just as a man to my team's left grumbled about having forgotten a powerful torch to see by.

He was mocked for it, gently. "You sound like Aidan," someone said further to his right. "He'd have brought the whole Hive out here."

"That reminds me of a story," someone else said. "There was a Level 80 water quality technician who came out here who hated the rough paths most of all. He got tired and started seeing things and convinced himself he was walking on an inter-zone slow belt. Turned true, in a way."

A slight pause was not met with any words, but a hum from one or two others encouraging him to keep talking.

"It was winter, just past New Year, and he found himself walking out on a frozen stream. Smooth as anything, it was. Until it cracked."

A chorus of appreciative groans met him. I blinked, and had to dip into Lucas' mind to try to understand. The images there filled me in. In winter, Outside, the surfaces of the largest streams froze, just like the skating rink I'd been to once on Level 28. Lucas was imagining the river above the waterfall at which we'd tracked down Elden. The pool above that waterfall would probably freeze over, some years. But because only the surface of the water froze, a smooth surface could betray great fragility, and water which was very dangerous to fall into.

I squeezed Lucas' hand, shivered, and missed the rest of the story.

But I didn't miss that the soft murmur of conversations in twos and threes had died down. That anecdote - maybe an anecdote? Despite the details, I wasn't sure if it had happened - marked a change. It was the time for stories now: all with a spooky bent to mark the season and to honour the dark that surrounded us.

One story described a woman who had died in an accident while walking along the Ocean Path alone. Her soul had been confused, disoriented, unable to make its way back to the Hive to be reborn as one of its citizens. 

When a group of hikers came near to her, she gravitated to them. However, their bodies, inhabited by souls, offered her no foothold; their souls, bound to bodies, could not sense her. Instead, she found herself bound to a compass, a direction-seeking device. She tried to turn it in the direction of the Hive, to make them go home.

Instead, the trampers quarrelled over which way they should go. The man who owned the compass struck out alone. Despite the lost spirit's efforts - _because_ of them - he too became lost and eventually succumbed to thirst and hunger.

"HIs body was found," the storyteller concluded, "and brought back to the Hive with his possessions. Whether the lost woman was able to disentangle herself from the compass... and rejoin the Hive... is not certain."

I wasn't at first sure what made that a spooky ending, and then imagined taking a compass outside that didn't work, and how it would feel to be Outside without my team and without crystal comms to ask for help. If the comms then broke... Or maybe it would be worse if they only worked some of the time, or made me think I was hearing words that weren't there.

The next storyteller said, "Should have taken some tips from Tommy," and told a much more light-hearted story about a lost soul in the same situation as the previous woman, whose attempts to recruit assistance to get back to the Hive had led to a series of farcical, rather than fatal, situations.

The clouds above us parted, the stars clear and cold. The stories turned to the Hunter of Souls and his malign influence. More than one of my Strike team members shifted uneasily, but I could sense that the crowd at the fire was holding back out of kindness to the greenies. Some years there would be more unsettling stories.

It was tradition to stay up all night to watch the fire, but I had no intention of doing that; the precious telepath was never encouraged to rough it on her voyages Outside. Lucas and I retreated to our deceptively reinforced tent shortly after midnight, and several Strike team members stayed awake - on the pretext of participation, but really to guard me.

"I wondered why Adika agreed to this," I said to Lucas, "but I think I understand now. This gathering is about reinforcing the bonds between Hive members, and banding together."

Lucas laughed. "The Ramblers Association is one of the most _official_ unofficial groups in the Hive," he said. "Its problematic members, if they're Outside tonight, will be elsewhere, around their own campfires."

He was more relaxed than usual. A year of partnership had given him confidence, but the scars of rejection had been laid on him over and over again. I sensed, without needing to read his mind, that distance from the Hive, and others who might be considered for partnership with me, was still faintly reassuring. And if it had been clearly present in his mind, it would probably have been a bare level above the subconscious.

We closed our tentflap, put a barrier between ourselves and the gathering, and proceeded to prove to each other that each of us would do for the other's world.


End file.
